Page 3 of Tempting as Sin
“I do not need a bloody caretaker,” Jace said. “I may have gone through a few dark days, but those days are over. I don’t need the kind of woman you’re talking about, either. You’d think she was boring, and I’d think she was worse. I want Paige and she wants me, and that’s all you need to know.”
Of course she wants you,Rafe didnotsay.How much was that last advance? What’s not to want? She’s a divorced cop with a loser ex and a father who worked in the Modesto stockyards.Rafe had checked her out. Jace hadn’t been to Modesto. Rafe had. Well, nottoit.Throughit. In July. Modesto in midsummer looked good in the rearview mirror.
Jace had been born with an extra protectiveness gene, but even protectors sometimes needed protecting. Which was why Rafe was here. Unannounced. If he was right, he’d be saving Jace from falling into that pit again. Better now than after that proposal, or, worse, after the marriage. He didn’t want to think what another shot to his brother’s heart would do. There were only so many times you could put the pieces back together without permanent damage.
And if he was wrong? It could get dicey, but he was an actor. He knew how to pivot. And he wasn’t expecting to be wrong.
An hour later, Rafe was waiting his turn at the concierge desk in the ornate marble lobby of the Fairmont Hotel. It was proving to be quite a wait, because the couple in front of him was having difficulties.
“So,” the woman was asking, “when we go out of the hotel, which way do we turn?”
“To the right, madam,” the patient fella in the suit answered. “Just remember—downhill.”
“And then we go where?” she asked.
“I’ve got it, honey,” her husband said, a shade of impatience tingeing his voice.
“Yousayyou’ve got it,” she said, “but we always end up lost.”
“We do not always end up lost,” he said. “You alwaysthinkwe’re lost.”
The concierge said, “I could program it into your maps app, if you like.”
“I don’t trust those,” the man said. “I’ll just follow my nose, and we’ll get there.”
“Eventually,” the woman said. “Maybe. It’s our anniversary,” she told the concierge. “Forty-five years. If we end up stabbed to death in some horrible neighborhood, tell our grandchildren that I loved them.”
Her husband snorted, the concierge smiled, and everybody started folding up maps. The hubby was letting her have the last word, then. Maybe that was the secret to forty-five years.
Rafe stayed where he was. The fact that nobody was paying any attention to him meant that the new look and brown contact lenses were working. Besides, it was fascinating, and not just in a cautionary-tale kind of way. The woman had her hand through her husband’s arm, he’d squeezed that arm tighter and put his other hand over hers as they walked away, and Rafe could swear that they both felt that those forty-five years had been well spent. Loving each other right where you were. Not easy.
The carefully groomed, business-casual brunette behind him sighed and said, “Finally,” and Rafe said, “Yeah,” and stepped forward.
He didn’t need the advice. He wanted the practice.
“Can I help you, sir?” the concierge asked, with no flicker at all in his eyes.
“You sure can,” Rafe said, channeling his not-inner West Virginian. Clay Austin, to be precise, late of the Union Army. He had an unexpected night off? He might as well use it. Which meant taking his slow-talking, fast-drawing sheriff-for-hire out for a spin. Superheroes were all good, but this…this was apart.It wouldn’t be big money, but that wasn’t what he needed right now. He needed a stretch, and a way out of the seductive quicksand of the easy road. “I’m looking for a real nice bar,” he told the concierge. “Someplace with some class. Where would you suggest?”
That was why, half an hour later, he was walking into the gorgeously lit, exotically paneled Redwood Room of the Clift Hotel. The bar was busy, but not crowded. Monday evening, he calculated. He tended to get his days of the week mixed up when he traveled across time zones.
Some finance and corporate types here, and some tourist types, too. Not many techies—at least, nobody wearing skinny jeans and wool sneakers. Those, the concierge had told him, would be the South of Market crowd, next on his list. If this group were the Old West’s bankers and cattle brokers, what would the techies be? The cowboys? No. Cowboys worked too hard and died too poor. The gold miners, maybe, except, again, that most of them had died broke. Maybe the blokes who’d sold the picks and shovels to the gold miners. Or the homesteaders, staking their claim and digging deep to make it pay off, taking their shot at independence. But would you get rich? Maybe, if you prospered and expanded and became one of those cattle barons…
The thought was in his head, and then it was gone.
She was sitting at one end of the backlit, etched-glass bar, swiveled around enough on her stool to take in the room, with her elegant legs crossed, her coat thrown over the back of the stool, a glossy white shopping bag on the floor beneath her and a fashionable clutch on the bar in front of her. One graceful hand caressing the stem of a martini glass, and the other in her lap. No tension. No fidgets.
It wasn’t that she was dressed up, because she wasn’t. Casual all the way, except that her look had taken effort, and he knew it. Dark stretch jeans, soft gray low-heeled boots, and an asymmetrical top in patches of blue velvet, lace, and something like linen. It had two collars and was ruffled on one side only, and had just enough vee of neckline to let you check out whether her skin could possibly be as smooth as you imagined. One of those garments that always confused him, but then, a woman like that would confuse you anyway. The dark-blue velvet jacket she was wearing over it added some more softness, in case you hadn’t got the message.
She was wearing the kind of makeup meant to make a man think she wasn’t wearing any and was just naturally that perfect, while her blonde hair, a glorious mixture of gold, platinum, and caramel, shone as if that bar had been lit up just to showcase her. Even that, though, managed to look accidental. The hair was pulled up into a messy knot with stray wisps brushing a sweet curve of jawline, her full pink lips held a faint smile, and she wasn’t looking at a phone or using any of the other tricks a woman like her would have in her arsenal to put up a barrier. All the same, she had a dignity and a distance about her that dared you to breach it.
Or maybe that was just him.
He couldn’t tell what color her eyes were. He was guessing blue. He wanted to know. He also wanted to know if there was a ring on her finger. Probably. She spelled “rich and pampered” all the way.
And yet…and yet. Something about her was pulling him straight across the room as if she had a superpower of her own, and it was more than her confidence and her sophistication. It was something else. Something sweeter. Softer. Velvet and lace.
Every alarm bell was going off. His defenses had dropped too low, clearly, part of him still caught up in that breakup and its messy aftermath. When you’d loved and left America’s Sweetheart, and she’d bravely taken on the world with that perfect, heart-shaped, wounded-kitten face, the shine in those big blue eyes and the tremble of those pink lips as she insisted she was “fine,” you tended to get wary. Actors didn’t get to the top by accident, and Kylie Jordan had had years of practice looking sweet and broken. It wasn’t much fun, Rafe was discovering, being America’s Bastard. So—vulnerability? No, thank you. Failed experiment. Back to a woman with her own priorities, but who was willing to fit you in.
